Garçon manqué (2000), premier récit autobiographique de Nina Bouraoui, raconte l'enfance d'une narratrice partagée entre quatre identités conflictuelles -française et algérienne, féminine et masculine -qu'elle cherche à concilier. Bouraoui y expose un cheminement identitaire complexe: alors que le texte s'ouvre sur le désir, très fort, de la jeune Nina de quitter ce qu'elle nomme « le camp » des femmes, il se ferme sur sa réconciliation totale et heureuse avec une féminité apparemment stéréotypée, mais en réalité renouvelée. Cette confusion identitaire est attribuée à la force de pressions sociales et familiales contradictoires à laquelle la narratrice sent devoir se soumettre. Garçon manqué montre comment, de sa prise de conscience du caractère construit de ces diktats, la narratrice en vient à une prise de parole littéraire salvatrice. Notre mémoire s'intéresse à l'évolution de la perception de son genre par la narratrice. D'abord éprouvé comme une structure aliénante et figée, il est finalement considéré comme malléable et potentiellement libérateur. Nous croyons que ce cheminement identitaire se déploie selon trois mouvements principaux, soit la construction, la déconstruction et enfin la reconstruction identitaires. Alors qu'on lit généralement Bouraoui sous l'angle post-colonialiste, l'originalité de notre projet se trouve dans le parti pris que nous adoptons, soit celui de considérer Garçon manqué comme un texte fondateur de son oeuvre en raison avant tout du questionnement sur l'identité sexuelle et sur le désir qu'il renferme. Notre approche intègre les théories féministes matérialistes, les gender studies, les queer studies, et les théories de l'agentivité (« agency »). En premier lieu, nous convoquons principalement des féministes travaillant à étudier les mécanismes d'oppression des femmes selon un point de vue constructiviste et matérialiste. Puis, nous faisons appel à une discipline émergente, les queer studies, qui permettent de lire le rapport de la narratrice à son genre et à ses désirs à l'intérieur d'un espace de réflexion qui fait éclater les frontières de la pensée binaire. Ensuite, nous nous inspirons des théories de l'agentivité (« agency ») et du pouvoir des mots afin de montrer comment le texte littéraire permet à Nina Bouraoui de reprendre possession de sa propre histoire. Enfin, la « théorie du placard » développée par Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick guide notre lecture de l'affirmation du lesbianisme par l'auteure de Garçon manqué, pensée comme un acte de langage risqué, mais stimulant et nécessaire. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Agentivité (Agency), Féminisme, Garçon manqué, Genre, Gender Studies, Nina Bouraoui, Queer Studies, Théorie du placard.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2007. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 205-213). Also available online in Scholars' Bank; and in ProQuest, free to University of Oregon users.

30 years after the coining of autofiction (Doubrovsky, 1977), there is still no general consensus about its exact meaning. This research set out to discover autofiction, whether there is a need for this term, why the public has taken such an interest in autofiction. Research questions were divided into two major categories: 1. What is autofiction? What is its origin? How has it evolved? Which differences are there, if any, between autobiography and autofiction? Is there a need for the separate genre of autofiction? Why/why not? What are its general characteristics? 2. Do the three analysed women authors – Nothomb, Beyala and Bouraoui – incorporate these elements in their writing? If so, how and why? Is autofictional writing a stage/posture in the personal writing development of an author? Is there any link between the writing of the own persona and the obsession with the public persona? Concentrating on terminological and theoretical issues, extensive literature review was done in the first part of the research. Starting from main literary criticism regarding fiction and autobiography/autofiction, the theoretical side of my research dealt with narrative identity and the true/false dichotomy of fact/fiction. Together with qualitative research about intertextuality as applied by autofictional writers (difference plagiarism and intertextual borrowing) led to a functional definition of autofiction, the basis for the comparative study of the three authors. For the research into their public persona, extensive internet research and analysis of newspaper articles were undertaken to show: 1. how the authors portray themselves; 2. how they are perceived by the media; 3. how this possibly influences their writing style. Autofiction requires analysis of: 1. why authors write 2. about what they write 3. how they incorporate the Self and the world in their writing. Bouraoui compares writing to an almost sexual act of love, the most intimate possible. Writing was the only way she could deal with childhood memories and repressed homosexuality. Beyala writes to communicate with others, while Nothomb considers writing as a means to live more intensely, after anorexia. The specificities and distinctive characteristics of the texts and authors were discovered through narrative analysis (factual research into the authors’ public persona + textual analysis of literary oeuvres). In Chapter 3 (Calixthe Beyala), feminine literary criticism as well as postcolonial theories guided my reading. Chapter 4 (Nina Bouraoui) allowed reflexion on the links between memory, identity, truth and autofictional writing. All chapters included research on Doubrovsky’s link between psychoanalysis and autofiction. In conclusion, there is a strong indication that one should speak of autofictions in the plural. This research explains some of the differences between autobiography and autofiction while underlining the importance of the existence of this new, separate sub-genre. The researcher had an opportunity to reflect on human memory and re-interpretation of facts. Where does the dividing line between truth and falsehood fall when the author puts the reader deliberately on a false track by introducing his/her work as « a novel »? Recent, post-modern writing has deliberately transgressed the fine dividing line between fact/fiction. The present research corroborates this view. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2011.

ix, 213 p. A print copy of this title is available from the UO Libraries, under the call number: KNIGHT PQ673 .C53 2007 / This dissertation is an analysis of the ways in which the remembered past of childhood is inscribed in four francophone novels written at the turn of the twenty-first century: Nina Bouraoui's L'âge blessé and Garçon manqué, Ying Chen's Le champ dans la mer, and Gisèle Pineau's L'espérance-macadam. These texts belong to a substantial corpus of contemporary narratives in which the remembering of childhood experiences plays a central role. Within that corpus we find a new approach to childhood emerging, one in which an unfamiliar past returns through the remembered voice of a wounded child. This voice overwhelms the text, fracturing the narrative through the irruption of images that it cannot contain. This dissertation is a study of the characteristics of this new "aesthetics of rupture." Memories of childhood in these texts are overshadowed by shattering past events that went unrecognized and unacknowledged. As a result of the wounds inflicted upon the child, the adult narrator remembers the past through physical symptoms of pain. Far from suturing the wounds of the past, remembering childhood becomes an incessant confrontational engagement with past traumas. The reader is then able to hear the scream of the wide-eyed child through a process of empathetic identification with the narrator's visceral memories. My introductory chapters provide a historical context to the development of representations of childhood in French and Francophone literature. Chapter III studies the ways in which childhood memories can actualize the past as a set of interruptive and destabilizing images. Theories of the non-representational revelation of the past serve as a starting point to my reading of Bouraoui's L'âge blessé. Chapter IV concentrates on the affective quality of memories so as to understand the narrator's ambivalent affective relationship to the past of childhood in Chen's Le champ dans la mer. Chapter V attempts to capture the ways in which the memory of a child's voice can be heard as a literary scream in Bouraoui's Garçon manqué. Chapter VI is a reading of Pineau's L'espérance-macadam in which I take into account the unseen gaze of the child to consider the role of hope in this text. / Adviser: Karen McPherson